Erika Rolfsrud and Jack Koenig play the unhappily married couple of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party."Carol Rosegg

When it premiered on Broadway in 1950, T.S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party” was the snob hit of its day, running more than a year and snaring a Tony for Best Play. This despite — or maybe because — most people didn’t have a clue what to make of it.

The current revival by The Actors Company Theatre is unlikely to have the same impact, but it does provide a welcome chance to see this rarely performed play.

Eliot’s work is a verse play (not that you can really tell), supposedly based on a Greek tragedy (again, not that you can discern), that uses the conventions of drawing-room comedy to delve into religious and psychological issues.

It begins with a cocktail party held by barrister Edward Chamberlayne (Jack Koenig) for several friends, including the relentless busybody Julia (Cynthia Harris) and Celia (Lauren English), with whom the barrister’s having an affair. Edward’s wife, Lavinia (Erika Rolfsrud), is absent, supposedly caring for an elderly aunt, but actually she has just fled her marriage.

Among the guests is a mysterious stranger (Simon Jones) who counsels Edward about his marital troubles after the others have left. In Act 2, we learn that he is actually Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a psychiatrist whose methods are, to put it mildly, highly unorthodox.

There’s a reason the play has largely been consigned to academia. Talky, tedious and unconvincing, it comes across now as little more than a dated curiosity, and director Scott Alan Evans’ competent but uninspired staging does little to revivify it.

The performances are fine, and Koenig’s particularly strong as the troubled Edward. But while Jones provides an intriguing ambiguity to the godlike shrink, it’s hard not to wistfully imagine what Alec Guinness must have brought to the role originally.